The Buddha breaks the analogical pact. He ignores correspondences. He doesn’t deny their existence, but he belittles them. Why concern oneself over echoes of like and like when all elements are anyway linked together in the same chain, in the way they manifest themselves, and for the mere fact that they do manifest themselves?
The tragic is the unique and irreversible act. To elude the tragic, the Buddha dilutes every action in a series of actions, every life in a series of lives, every death in a series of deaths. Suddenly everything loses its consistency. Whatever is multiplied is also extenuated. Simultaneous with this gesture came the epistemological denial of the existence of the Self, now reduced to a series of elements that can be added together and unified in conventional fashion.
Convention, the supreme power of the modern, proceeds along a path cleared before it by a dry, cautious, analytic monk, who drained away the energy of the divine figures without even taking the trouble to remove them.
“The animate universe, like sand in the fist,” said the Buddha. A multiplicity of tiny elements, all entirely alien to one another. Trapped in the same grip. But this is their one affinity. In every other respect, each grain is on its own, unconnected with the others, even though the substance is always the same.
The Buddha was in no hurry to go back to Kapilavastu. But one day he did reappear in the place where he had spent his infancy and youth. His son, Rāhula, was there, whom he remembered as no more than a shadow in his mother’s bed, the night he had left her. When she got news of the Buddha’s return, Rāhula’s mother said to her son: “Now go to your father. Go and ask him for your inheritance.”
While the Buddha was wandering around northeast India, stopping from time to time to expound the doctrine to his followers, history went on just the same. So the day came when the Śākyas were massacred. That morning the Buddha told his monks that he had a bad headache, as if a stone were pressing down on his head, a stone that was a mountain. Meanwhile, one by one, his relatives were being exterminated, and with them the entire tribe of the Śākyas. Virūḍhaka, king of the Kosalas, had launched a surprise attack. Following an ancient tradition, the Śākyas were excellent archers. But because they had heard the words of the Buddha, they were no longer willing to kill. Hence, though their arrows were able to slow down the massacre, they could not stop it. Virūḍhaka had brooded long over his vendetta, ever since those wretched provincials at Kapilavastu, who spoke as if they were guardians of the dharma when in the end they were just his subjects like anybody else, had called him “son of a slave.” He wanted that arrogant, unarmed tribe to die in agony. He had a large number of pits dug and ordered that the men and women be piled in them, packed tight. Then he had them trampled on by elephants. There were only a few, desperate survivors. They reached the Buddha in the forest and told him what had happened. When they left, they asked if they could take some relics with them. The Buddha gave them a few hairs and nail parings. After that, he never saw them again. It is said that they founded a kingdom in Vakuḍa, a place no one has ever seen.
The Buddha was alone now. He had no relatives, nor any home to go back to. Kapilavastu had been razed to the ground — and likewise his much loved Park of the Banyans. Of his family, his cousin and constant shadow, Ānanda, was the only survivor. Together they made no comment. Not even when a few days later they heard that Virūḍhaka and his troops had been drowned in a torrent of flood water that had swept down the stony bed of the Aciravatī River. Gloating over their loot, the Kosalas had camped there for the night.
Like Kṛṣṇa, the Buddha can only appear close to the “dissolution,” the pralaya. Behind these two there is always a massacre. Before them, a stretch of water swollen with wreckage. At least Kṛṣṇa had fought, and intrigued, though he never bore arms. The massacre came about just the same. Not so the Buddha. He did not intervene. And once again the massacre took place. Had they stood in its way somehow? Had they instigated it? Had they let it happen? Perhaps the massacre was just a premonitory sign of the real and inevitable event: the rushing floodwater that would dissolve all, wipe away the profile of a world and return it to what it had originally been: a residue. And among those residues, among the uprooted trees, the sodden timbers and washed-out rags, barely distinguishable from the endless watery surface, a coiled snake, soft as a cushion, would one day emerge. An adolescent body lay on that bed, carmine lips opening to the sky.
Why was the residue granted this privilege? Why, rather than representing the insignificant, did it become the place that conceals the essential? When the vrātyas played in the sabhā, first with heaps of nuts, later with two dice, the winning throw was kṛta: a number divisible by four with nothing left over. After that came tretā and dvāpara; respectively the throws that gave remainders of three and two. The losing throw, kali, the “dog’s throw,” was the throw that gave a remainder of one, the irreducible remainder. The names of these throws were then transferred to the different eras, or yugas: kṛta was the perfect age; kali the age of conflict and ruin, which continues to this day, ever more vividly prefiguring the “dissolution,” pralaya, the longer it goes on. Even when they divided up time into the calendar, they realized that there was always a remainder, an intercalary period that obliged them to make adjustments and new, more complicated calculations. The game, in which destiny is decided, and time: following these two trails, they reached a conclusion: one can only eliminate any residue in the realm of the discontinuous. The continuous, by contrast, is ever elusive. The discontinuous rests, drifts, on the continuous. Through the residue, the continuous forcibly reminds us of its existence. However subtly broken up, the discontinuous never quite manages to superimpose itself over the continuous. The difference is the surplus: that which must be sacrificed, in order for the equation, if only for a while, to come out. For a while: that is, until a new residue forms and is noticed. Obliging us once again to bow down before the continuous.
Something does get transmitted from one avatāra to another: a weak trace of the history that went before, the disaster that went before. The peculiarity of an aeon just concluded is passed on to the next aeon as a flavor, a tone, a veiled memory. Being ripens, is streaked, speckled, made anew with pieces that are already worn out. And much is lost. Something of Kṛṣṇa the negotiator, the military adviser of the Pāṇḍavas, ever absorbed in a plan obscure to all but himself, gets rubbed off on the prince of the Śākyas who left his home: the Buddha. Something unites them, even if the words they used were now so different, as likewise the things they did. Their detachment unites them. Their turning away from the fruit.